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Collected Shorter Poems
This volume brings together all of Kenneth Rexroth’s shorter poems from 1920 to the present, including a group of new poems written since the publication of Natural Numbers, drawn from seven earlier books. This volume brings together all of Kenneth Rexroth’s shorter poems from 1920 to the present, including a group of new poems written since the publication of Natural Numbers, drawn from seven earlier books. Among the American poets of the generation that came to prominence in the Forties, Kenneth Rexroth has been notable both for the independence of his personal voice and for his accessibility to the tradition of international avant-garde literature. He began writing and publishing in magazines at fifteen. His earliest work was personal and concrete, much like that of the Imagists. In his twenties he wrote in the disassociative style––sometimes called "literary cubism "––developed by Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Reverdy. This was not free association, but the conscious disassociation and recombination of the elements of the poem to achieve the highest possible level of significance. With his later books Rexroth moved back to a direct and classically simple form of personal statement. In this period he wrote the great nature poems, the love poems, and the contemplative lyrics that have established his reputation as one of the most important American poets.
- GenresPoetryAnthologies
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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238 people want to read
About the author
Kenneth Rexroth
203 books110 followersKenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist.
He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine.
Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic themes and forms.
Rexroth died in Santa Barbara, California, on June 6, 1982. He had spent his final years translating Japanese and Chinese women poets, as well as promoting the work of female poets in America and overseas.
He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine.
Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic themes and forms.
Rexroth died in Santa Barbara, California, on June 6, 1982. He had spent his final years translating Japanese and Chinese women poets, as well as promoting the work of female poets in America and overseas.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 3, 2018
Good stuff, for the most part. The early experimental poetry doesn't interest me much, but around "The Phoenix and the Tortious" he starts to feel sort of like Du Fu writing in English, with such clean, clear, nimble language. I'm not sure if I find Rexroth very interesting as a thinker and his sort of transcendent eroticism never felt quite right to me, but he's a very pleasant poet to read. The only thing is--I wish I had been able to buy the complete poems instead of this one! I didn't realize this stopped so early in his career, especially since the influence from Chinese poetry seemed to become stronger as he aged. I may actually enjoy Rexroth more as a translator than a poet (his translations from the Greek, Chinese, and Japanese are some of the best I've read), but I'm still glad I picked this up.
July 1, 2017
Under this tree for a moment,
We have escaped the bitterness
Of love, and love lost, and love
Betrayed. And what might have been,
And what might be, fall equally
Away with what is, [...]
We have escaped the bitterness
Of love, and love lost, and love
Betrayed. And what might have been,
And what might be, fall equally
Away with what is, [...]
May 15, 2020
3.5 stars. I don't think these poems are aging all that well. One advantage they possess is that they are written in lucid language with very little purple prose and very few dated linguistic mannerisms. Rexroth's love of poetries of the past taught him something about what to avoid in his own. His work as a translator served him well in his vocation as a poet. On the negative side, Rexroth can dash off extremely boring poems. Some of the poems seem to have too much of the personal and not enough of the universal. Some of the poems make me wince because of the archaic stances on mores. Turning to his Lorca poem just now, "Blood and Sand," I am reminded of why I find much of his poetry so distasteful A few sample, bad lines: "They kept you pregnant, Federico, / With the chemicals of their unlust, / With their ugly, devouring sperm, / With their pustulant, corrosive blood." Okay. That's a lot of adjectives. And why bring innocent sperm into it and asperse it? There are some striking poems in the collection, the ones you might have seen anthologized sometime in the very distant past. If you don't mind the hot air of Rexroth's bloviations in your face and are patient, you might find them in here.
June 7, 2011
This is my desert island book. If I could choose only one book to read for the rest of my days this would be it. Perfect. Rexroth is THE most under-appreciated great writer of the 20th century.
July 12, 2016
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR AS A YOUNG ANARCHIST
1917-18-19,
While things were going on in Europe,
Our most used term of scorn or abuse
Was "bushwa." We employed it correctly,
But we thought it was French for "bullshit."
I lived in Toledo, Ohio,
On Delaware Avenue, the line
Between the rich and poor neighborhoods.
We played in the jungles by Ten Mile Creek,
And along the golf course in Ottawa Park.
There were two classes of kids, and they
Had nothing in common: the rich kids
Who worked as caddies, and the poor kids
Who snitched golf balls. I belonged to the
Saving group of exceptionalists
Who, after dark, and on rainy days,
Stole out and shat in the golf holes.
PAST AND FUTURE TURN ABOUT
Autumn has returned and we return
To the same beach in the last hours.
The Phoenix and the Tortoise is finished.
The gratuitous discipline of finality
Falls on our lives and shapes our ends.
Ourselves as objectives, our objects,
Pass from our hands to the hands of time.
Reconsidering and revising
My life and the meaning of my poem,
I gather once more within me
The old material, sea and stone.
The green spring that comes in November.
With the first rains has restored the hills.
Seals are playing in the kelp beds.
As the surf sweeps in they can be seen
Weaving over one another in
The standing water. In the granite
Cliffs are swarms of dark fish shaped patches
Of rock oriented to the flow lines
Of the hot magma. Nobody knows
Exactly what caused their formation
Deep in the blind earth under the blind
Jurassic world, under the dead
Franciscan series, what disorder,
What process. On the wet sand lie
Hundreds of jellyfish with pale
Lavender organs at their hearts.
The sun will dry them and leave only
A brittle film. There are more hundreds
Pulsing through the water, struggling
Against the drive of the rising tide.
Down the beach beyond a tangle
Of barbed wire an armed sentry stands,
Gazing seaward under his helmet.
Carapace or transfiguration –
History will doubtless permit us
Neither. Eventually the will
Exhausts itself and turns, seeking grace,
To the love that suffers ignorance
And time’s irresponsibility.
The Cross cannot be climbed upon.
It cannot be seized like a weapon
Against the injustices of the world.
“No one has ever seized injustice
In his bare hands and bent it back,
No one has ever tried to smash evil,
Without smashing himself and sinking
Into greater evil or despair.”
The Satanic cunning represents
Itself as very strong, but just
A trifle weaker than its victim.
This is the meaning of temptation.
The Devil does not fool with fools.
It is easy to read or write
In a book, “Self realization
Is responsible self sacrifice.”
“The will to power, the will to live,
Are fulfilled by transfiguration.”
“The person is the final value;
Value is responsibility.”
As the world sinks in a marsh of blood,
You won’t raise yourself by your bootstraps,
However pious and profound.
Christ was not born of Socrates,
But to a disorderly people,
In an evil time, in the flesh
Of innocence and humility.
"The self determining will." What self?
What determination? History
Plays its pieces - "The Japanese
Adventure was shaped on the countless
G'oto tables of a hundred years."
Black slowly immobilizes white.
Evil reveals its hidden aces.
As the Philosopher obserserves,
"Fear is the sentiment of men
Beaten and overcome in mind,
Confronted by an imminent evil
Which they take to be too much for them
To resist and more than they can bear."
And again, appropriately, in the Rhetoric,
"We are never afraid of evil
When we are in the thick of it
And all chance of escape has vanished.
Fear always looks to flight, and catches
With the fancy's eye some glimpse
Of an opening for the avoidance
Of evil."
"O my father, all things
Are possible unto Thee, if it be
Possible let this cup pass from me.
Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine."
The self determining will accepts
The responsibility of all
Contingency. What will? What self?
The Cross descends into the world
Like a sword, but the hilt thereof
Is in the heavens. Every man
Is his own Adam, left to itself,
The self unselfs itself, the will
Demands autonomy and achieves
It by a system of strategic
Retreats - the inane autonomy
Of the morally neuter event.
Conversion, penitence, and grace -
Autonomy is a by product
Of identification.
What was our sacrifice worth?
Practically nothing, the waste
Of time overwhelms heroes,
Pyramids and catastrophes.
Who knows the tropical foci
Of the Jurassic ice flows?
Who has seen the frozen black mass
That rushes upon us biding
Its light years? Who remembers
The squad that died stopping the tanks
At the bridgehead? The company
Was bombed out an hour later.
Simonides is soon forgotten.
The presence of the unfound
Future is the pressure of the lost
Past, the brain stiffens with hope,
And swims in hallucination
Beating its spinal column
Like a flagellate in a mild
Solution of alcohol,
And pressed against it, mantis
To mantis, the cobwebbed body -
the caput abdominale.
As for that thin entelechy,
The person, let him wear the head
Of the wolf, in Sherwood Forest.
We return? Each to each, one
To another, each to the other?
Sweet lovely hallucination -
The sea falls through you, through the gulf
Of wish - last spring - what was value?
The hole itself cuts in its self
And watches as it fills with blood?
The waves of the sea fall through
Our each others indomitable
As peristalsis.
Autumn comes
And the death of flowers, but
The flowered colored waves of
The sea will last forever
Like the pattern on the dress
Of a beautiful woman.
Nineteen forty two and we
Are selves, strained, fixed and mounted
On the calendar - and the leaves
Fall easily in the gardens
Of a million ruins.
And deep
In the mountains the wind has stopped
The current of a stream with only
A windrow of the terribly
Red dogwood leaves.
1917-18-19,
While things were going on in Europe,
Our most used term of scorn or abuse
Was "bushwa." We employed it correctly,
But we thought it was French for "bullshit."
I lived in Toledo, Ohio,
On Delaware Avenue, the line
Between the rich and poor neighborhoods.
We played in the jungles by Ten Mile Creek,
And along the golf course in Ottawa Park.
There were two classes of kids, and they
Had nothing in common: the rich kids
Who worked as caddies, and the poor kids
Who snitched golf balls. I belonged to the
Saving group of exceptionalists
Who, after dark, and on rainy days,
Stole out and shat in the golf holes.
PAST AND FUTURE TURN ABOUT
Autumn has returned and we return
To the same beach in the last hours.
The Phoenix and the Tortoise is finished.
The gratuitous discipline of finality
Falls on our lives and shapes our ends.
Ourselves as objectives, our objects,
Pass from our hands to the hands of time.
Reconsidering and revising
My life and the meaning of my poem,
I gather once more within me
The old material, sea and stone.
The green spring that comes in November.
With the first rains has restored the hills.
Seals are playing in the kelp beds.
As the surf sweeps in they can be seen
Weaving over one another in
The standing water. In the granite
Cliffs are swarms of dark fish shaped patches
Of rock oriented to the flow lines
Of the hot magma. Nobody knows
Exactly what caused their formation
Deep in the blind earth under the blind
Jurassic world, under the dead
Franciscan series, what disorder,
What process. On the wet sand lie
Hundreds of jellyfish with pale
Lavender organs at their hearts.
The sun will dry them and leave only
A brittle film. There are more hundreds
Pulsing through the water, struggling
Against the drive of the rising tide.
Down the beach beyond a tangle
Of barbed wire an armed sentry stands,
Gazing seaward under his helmet.
Carapace or transfiguration –
History will doubtless permit us
Neither. Eventually the will
Exhausts itself and turns, seeking grace,
To the love that suffers ignorance
And time’s irresponsibility.
The Cross cannot be climbed upon.
It cannot be seized like a weapon
Against the injustices of the world.
“No one has ever seized injustice
In his bare hands and bent it back,
No one has ever tried to smash evil,
Without smashing himself and sinking
Into greater evil or despair.”
The Satanic cunning represents
Itself as very strong, but just
A trifle weaker than its victim.
This is the meaning of temptation.
The Devil does not fool with fools.
It is easy to read or write
In a book, “Self realization
Is responsible self sacrifice.”
“The will to power, the will to live,
Are fulfilled by transfiguration.”
“The person is the final value;
Value is responsibility.”
As the world sinks in a marsh of blood,
You won’t raise yourself by your bootstraps,
However pious and profound.
Christ was not born of Socrates,
But to a disorderly people,
In an evil time, in the flesh
Of innocence and humility.
"The self determining will." What self?
What determination? History
Plays its pieces - "The Japanese
Adventure was shaped on the countless
G'oto tables of a hundred years."
Black slowly immobilizes white.
Evil reveals its hidden aces.
As the Philosopher obserserves,
"Fear is the sentiment of men
Beaten and overcome in mind,
Confronted by an imminent evil
Which they take to be too much for them
To resist and more than they can bear."
And again, appropriately, in the Rhetoric,
"We are never afraid of evil
When we are in the thick of it
And all chance of escape has vanished.
Fear always looks to flight, and catches
With the fancy's eye some glimpse
Of an opening for the avoidance
Of evil."
"O my father, all things
Are possible unto Thee, if it be
Possible let this cup pass from me.
Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine."
The self determining will accepts
The responsibility of all
Contingency. What will? What self?
The Cross descends into the world
Like a sword, but the hilt thereof
Is in the heavens. Every man
Is his own Adam, left to itself,
The self unselfs itself, the will
Demands autonomy and achieves
It by a system of strategic
Retreats - the inane autonomy
Of the morally neuter event.
Conversion, penitence, and grace -
Autonomy is a by product
Of identification.
What was our sacrifice worth?
Practically nothing, the waste
Of time overwhelms heroes,
Pyramids and catastrophes.
Who knows the tropical foci
Of the Jurassic ice flows?
Who has seen the frozen black mass
That rushes upon us biding
Its light years? Who remembers
The squad that died stopping the tanks
At the bridgehead? The company
Was bombed out an hour later.
Simonides is soon forgotten.
The presence of the unfound
Future is the pressure of the lost
Past, the brain stiffens with hope,
And swims in hallucination
Beating its spinal column
Like a flagellate in a mild
Solution of alcohol,
And pressed against it, mantis
To mantis, the cobwebbed body -
the caput abdominale.
As for that thin entelechy,
The person, let him wear the head
Of the wolf, in Sherwood Forest.
We return? Each to each, one
To another, each to the other?
Sweet lovely hallucination -
The sea falls through you, through the gulf
Of wish - last spring - what was value?
The hole itself cuts in its self
And watches as it fills with blood?
The waves of the sea fall through
Our each others indomitable
As peristalsis.
Autumn comes
And the death of flowers, but
The flowered colored waves of
The sea will last forever
Like the pattern on the dress
Of a beautiful woman.
Nineteen forty two and we
Are selves, strained, fixed and mounted
On the calendar - and the leaves
Fall easily in the gardens
Of a million ruins.
And deep
In the mountains the wind has stopped
The current of a stream with only
A windrow of the terribly
Red dogwood leaves.
September 1, 2018
Some of his work really resonated with me but a lot seemed dated. But one of my favorites talked about a sacramental relationship between the poet and poetry--certain poems being so meaningful to someone that they are sacraments, holy. I have a least a dozen of those important poems. Rexroth got that right.
June 11, 2024
Let's bring back literary cubism. We can include the anarchist hope, but leave behind the outmoded homophobia.
October 2, 2016
The best there is. Some books ring true, no matter what direction you come at them from. This is one.
Reading Rexroth's poems and essays will make you a better and wiser person. His current obscurity as a writer, and the scarcity of writers and people like him ,is an indication of the desperate straits our society is in.
Reading Rexroth's poems and essays will make you a better and wiser person. His current obscurity as a writer, and the scarcity of writers and people like him ,is an indication of the desperate straits our society is in.
October 25, 2023
I knew I liked his translations, which I read in the City Lights anthology, but I am finally coming into his own poems. They are surprising, vintagey but delicious to sound out, and pleasingly intellectual. Sappho, Haydn, and the curves of Mt. Tam occupy the same neatly parsed space on the page.
April 14, 2008
When I was a teenager, I loved Beat poetry. Arguably, Rexroth was a beat, but I believe his poems transcend those restraints.
I read this book 10 years ago, and I still love it.
I read this book 10 years ago, and I still love it.
May 31, 2008
This is one of my "desert island" books.
November 17, 2008
Also look for the collected longer poems of this seminal anarchist poet.
January 14, 2013
Love this book of poems!
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews